


In the Dark, The Dawn

by AlwaysLera



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Aftermath, Aftermath of Torture, F/M, Feels, Friendship/Love, Mission Fic, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-14
Updated: 2013-01-15
Packaged: 2017-11-25 13:37:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/639421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlwaysLera/pseuds/AlwaysLera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of New York, Clint tries to put himself (and his relationship with Natasha) back together. They aren't given much time before someone moves to capitalize on the Avengers, Natasha, and Natasha's relationship with the archer with heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> WARNING: This fic has trigger warnings for sexual content, torture, alcohol abuse, and allusions to disordered eating patterns.

He was not supposed to be there, at her door, again. He never meant to be there. Before Loki went apeshit on planet earth, they had agreed not to do this anymore. No more one night stands, they said. It puts us in a compromising position, they said. It was a mutual decision, him and Natasha. But in the aftermath of Loki’s cataclysmic ability to destroy all that Clint held dear, he found himself pacing in front of Natasha’s building in Brooklyn. He spent the afternoon going rounds with Steve in the gym and he was bruised and bloodied, and not just his ego. Every time he closed his eyes, he could see it, the glint in Loki’s eyes, the way he told Clint, you were a prize. It was one of the hundred things Loki told Clint when he was under Loki’s control that haunted Clint. Fuck. He even found himself getting dizzy while scaling a building the other day to cover rescue and recovery crews on the ground. The Hawk! Getting dizzy at heights! It was like...it was like asking Steve not to be a good guy, or Tony to be humble, or the Hulk to smash delicately. Subtly was a skill that few of the Avengers had. It was one that Natasha could claim wholly. But subtle she would not be if she found out he was pacing outside of her door.  
  
It used to be easy. They used to fuck themselves back to reality. They were spies, after all, not soldiers. They were different than the rest. But when their missions altered, slowly, and changed, and they started killing more and more people, when collateral damage that others wrote off started to build in their missions, both of them lost track of themselves. Clint drank. Natasha. Well. Natasha had her own ways of coping. He couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t still halfway there all of the time. They found that sex brought them back into themselves. It grounded them in a way that nothing else could. It was rough, and it hurt, and it played out their guilt and their shame. And who better than each other? Natasha didn’t trust anyone, not even Clint, and Clint was never seen as trustworthy by anyone other than Natasha.   
  
Especially in the last two weeks. He may have helped them in the end, but when he showed up to Coulson’s funeral, he got the cold shoulder from the rest of the crew. Everyone but Natasha. And it wasn’t like she greeted him with hearts and flowers. She didn’t smile at him or kiss him on the cheek or tell him she was glad he came. But she stood next to him. She walked over, across the gap, and stood next to him, her hands tucked into the backs of her black jean pockets and her lower lip sucked under her front teeth while she stared at the coffin.   
  
His phone buzzed in his pocket and Clint pulled it out, punching in his passcode while turning his back to the building, walking a few steps away.  
  
 **NRom:** _You going to stand out there all night?_  
  
He turned and looked up at her windows. The light was on but he did not see her silhouette. But Natasha was never seen when she didn’t want to be seen.   
  
He texted back: _you letting me in?_  
 **NRom:** _You look like you could use a drink._  
  
He took it to mean a yes. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and hustled to the door. She was standing there with it open. Her dark scarlet locks were pulled back into a ponytail and she wore a plain blue tshirt and yoga pants that came to her knees. She raised an eyebrow at him as he stepped through the doorway and she held out her hand.  
  
“Check your weapons at the door, Barton. You know the rules.”  
  
There were many rules in Natasha’s world but she was referring to only one of them. The rule was that no one was more armed at any given time than Natasha. He tossed her the bag slung over his shoulder with his bow and quiver in it. She caught it deftly and carried it up the stairs, hanging it on a hook inside the door and gesturing him inside. He felt exhausted, like he had carried someone for miles (Natasha, over his shoulder, Beirut, two years ago, he could still see all the blood outside of her body that should have been inside of her body, why couldn’t it just stay where it was supposed to). He felt her hand close around his wrist and it was like she snatched his heart and pumped it with her own hand, bringing it back to life and then chasing it through his veins. He exhaled, slowly, pushing desire out of his brain and sucking in the life she was giving him.  
  
“Clint.” She said, and her voice wasn’t gentle. It was sharp and edged. It was the Natasha she loved. He’d never want sympathy from her, just like she’d probably carve his apology on his forehead if he ever showed her any sort of sympathy. Sympathy, like love, was for children and the weak. Sympathy is one of five emotions Natasha allowed people to feel before she killed them.   
  
He looked up, his grey eyes meeting the green, and finding them sharp, but not critical. He tilted his head at her and she rolled her eyes. She turned her hand upwards and flicked her fingers towards her palm. “Knife. Brass knuckles.”  
  
“I forgot about them,” he told her honestly, fishing the knife out of his belt where it was hidden in the buckle and the knuckles out of the inside pocket of his coat. He handed both over easily. He didn’t worry. Not here. Besides, after spending the afternoon of getting the shit beaten out of him by a guy who was perpetually smiling, Clint almost dared someone to try and get the jump on him and Natasha tonight.  
  
Now that the door was shut, he stopped focusing on him and his eyes watched Natasha. She moved around her small kitchen, half her attention on him, and the other half on everything outside of her apartment. She moved like a lionness on the hunt, constantly, hyperaware, on the tops of her toes, her hands long, graceful, artful, and ready to kill, even as they wrapped around a mug of tea that she brought over to him. She handed him the mug, still watching him like she half expected him to snap.  
  
He said, “I thought you meant something to drink.”  
  
She gave him a very slight smile, a carryover from her Russian childhood. He loved her smile. He loved the way she never let her teeth show when she smiled, the way her top lip tightened over those front teeth, like she may have had a gap there as a child, before the Red Room fixed it because heaven forbid there be anything not perfect about her face (it was solidly his opinion that a gap between her front teeth would probably make her look even more endearing--but he spent most of his life avoiding death, so he’d never ever say this to her, not even with thousands of miles between them). Her eyes didn’t break contact. When she was shy, or trying to seduce, or when she was not trying to seduce but wanted him in bed anyways, she always broke eye contact in some fashion. Now she held it.   
  
She said softly, her voice catching on the vowels and curving around them, like arms, like comfort, “You’ve had enough to drink in your lifetime, Barton. And that’s coming from a Russian. Have some tea.”  
  
She did not sit down though. He sipped at the tea tentatively, wincing when he thought about what Stark would say if he could see him now. She moved around the kitchen, opening the fridge and pulling out a tupperware container. She peeled off the lid and stared at the container. The sides of her mouth twitched as she contemplated the contents of the container.   
  
He said, “It’s midnight, Tasha.”  
  
She glanced over at him without moving her head. “So?”  
  
He softened his voice. He didn’t care. “You’re just eating now?”  
  
If he didn’t know her, he wouldn’t have noticed the way she gritted her teeth. The way her fingers flinched against the tupperware. But he knew her. He lowered his eyes to stare into the pale brown tea and take another sip. He hated tea. He hated the bitterness. He hated the way Natasha thought that milk and sugar perverted beverages and she didn’t even have either in the house.   
  
The first time he stayed over at Natasha’s, the whole night, he woke up later than her (always--it took him months to find out if she actually slept or not) and stumbled out of the bedroom. She had been sitting on the countertop, dangling her legs, scrolling through her laptop over the news, bouncing between the New York Times and a SHIELD briefing report. She had poured him a cup of coffee and handed it to him without looking at him. When he asked for milk or sugar, she had calmly looked up, stared him dead in the eye, and promised him she’d kill him if he insulted her in that way ever again. He had stared back at her, unsure whether to take her at face value or not, but it was Natasha and for her, more than anyone else at SHIELD, the line between her persona and her private self was particularly thin. It was not always an act.   
  
That was the first, and last time, he asked for milk or sugar for his coffee or tea.  
  
Now, he stared into his tea to avoid looking her in the eye not because he was afraid of her but because she needed a moment and the least he could do since she took him in was give him a moment. He heard her open the microwave and slide the tupperware onto the plate. The door shut and she pressed buttons (Three. Three. Zero. Power: 10. Start) and then sat down at the breakfast bar across from him.   
  
She said, “Fury sent me to Buenos Aires last week. It was supposed to be something longer, five, six months at least, deep cover.”  
  
He looked up, trying not to let surprise flicker in his eyes. He had not heard of it. Everything Natasha did, with or without him, someone at SHIELD usually told him. Typically, it was Tony being snarky, or Steve thinking he was being kind, or Fury or Coulson trying to keep Hawkeye from going rogue looking for him. He wasn’t supposed to know, but he had good intel that the same thing was done for her in return. When they weren’t assigned together, they knew where each other was serving, even when they shouldn’t. But this. This he hadn’t heard of. His heart skipped slightly. If she had left, then, right after all of that bullshit that went down, and he came here, and she wasn’t here, where would he be?  
  
“Stop looking like that,” Natasha said, shaking her head, “I didn’t go, did I? I mean, I went, but we didn’t stay down there. Someone got the mark before we did. But that’s the second time it’s happened on my missions. Just before all of the Loki...” she trailed off for a second and then rallied, “there was something. Mogadishu. I was marking a weapons dealer. And someone nicked him ten days after I started on him. And I had good covers.”  
  
“Hmph,” was all Clint could say but he turned the information over in his head. He sipped his tea. “This is fucking awful shit, Tash.”  
  
She tried not to smile. “It’s tea. It can’t be bad. It’s too weak to be bad.”  
  
He pulled a face. “How’d you know I was outside?”  
  
“The same way you knew this is the first time I’ve sat down to eat today,” she replied dryly, and the microwave dinged. “We’re predictable.”  
  
He watched her take the meal out, blow on it, and carefully dig into it, eating one forkful slowly. He swallowed and looked away. He shouldn’t be watching her eat. Only Natasha could seduce a man when she was eating chinese leftovers.   
  
She finished her meal and tossed the container lazily into the sink with a clatter. Clint rolled his eyes at her and she gave him another quick, small smile. She reached over and stuck a finger in his tea and sucked on her finger. Clint felt his eyes widened at that. She released her finger and said something.  
  
“I’m sorry?” Clint managed to say.  
  
She smirked. “Your tea is cold, Barton.”  
  
He said, “Warm it up for me, then.”  
  
“How?”   
  
She was enjoying playing with him. She always did. He tried to play nonchalant. He shrugged. “I’m sure you can think of some way.”  
  
She opened her mouth, about to make a sassy reply, and then abruptly shut up, frowned at him and withdrew her hand. She sat back in her chair and watched him quizzically, her eyebrows arching towards her brow. She opened her mouth again, closed it again, and folded her hands in front of her, tilting her head so she was looking at him like he had something completely befuddling. Confused Natasha was not a version of Natasha that Clint was used to and for a moment, he almost laughed at her, at her bemusement and the unsure way her eyes traveled his face and his hands. But he stopped himself, if only because the thought of Natasha’s default setting when she was confused silenced him. He was fairly sure she was more of a “kill first, question later” girl when she was on unstable footing. And she certainly appeared to be unsure, though he wasn’t sure why.  
  
She murmured, “We said we wouldn’t.”  
  
He stared determinedly into his tea again. “I know.”  
  
Her voice was sure and edged. “It’s just...you know. When I got the call that you had been compromised.”  
  
They hadn’t talked about this and he was not here to talk about it. He pushed back the tea and stood up. Over his shoulder as he grabbed his bag from the hooks by the door, he said, “Thanks for the tea.”  
  
“Barton.”  
  
“I appreciate it,” he said. “And I’m glad you had dinner.”  
  
“Barton.”  
  
He opened the door.  
  
“Clint.”  
  
He stopped.  
  
She was standing behind him. “We said we wouldn’t, Clint. I fucked up. I compromised myself and everyone because you were compromised.”  
  
“I apologize for that inconvenience,” he snarled into the hallway. “You know I didn’t intend on becoming Loki’s minion--”  
  
He was jerked backwards and pushed against the wall and his instincts kicked in. He grabbed her wrists and slammed her backwards against the wall, hands above her head, softening the force when he realized it was just Natasha (didn’t his whole life boil down to that? Just Natasha.). He almost missed the wicked grin on her face--teeth showing, bared like a wild animal--before she pulled her legs up and kicked him backwards in the chest. He grunted and let go of her wrists and she yanked the door shut by the time he rebounded, shoving her up against the door, pinning her with her hands and his hips. She met his gaze with a ferocity he hadn’t known he missed.   
  
She whispered, “Compromise me, Barton.”  
  
Oh, he could do that. He could do that.   
**  
**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: sexual content below ;)

  
  
       She had asked him to compromise her, but she hadn’t expected him to do it so well. There was an art form to seduce the queen of seduction, and sometime, a long while ago, Clint had learned her well. Under any other circumstances, that a man could learn how to manipulate her, how to turn her on like this would be insulting, if not life threatening. But it was Clint, and right now, it was Clint and his hands and his mouth (oh, god, his mouth) and if anyone had the right or ability to thwart her defenses, it ought to be him. Hadn’t it always been him? And if, at times, her body betrayed her, if she rose off the bed, levitating by her hips, unnatural noises choking out from her chest to her mouth and into his, then she couldn’t be blamed. It was always him.   
  
       She thought, at first, he was going to fuck her against her front door. It wouldn’t be the first time but her back still hurt from jumping off a building in Buenos Aires when things were going south (not unlike Clint, at that moment). It was strange, the way a brain could jump between pain and pleasure and have those remain distinct sensations in the body, like they ran up separate parts of her spinal cord and into her brain. Some part of her brain began to analyze that information but then Clint’s hands were on her waist, tugging at the hem of her tshirt and she obediently lifted her arms over her head. He pulled the shirt over her head, breaking the precious contact of his mouth with her neck, ears, face, collarbones, but then it was his mouth on the warm, soft skin of her stomach and she gasped, her hands falling down onto his hair, the tshirt discarded to the side. She sucked in her stomach, pulling it away from his mouth as he trailed his mouth, staccato stumbling lips up her stomach, onto her rib cage, to the underside of her breasts and then her head tipped back, her fingers gripped his arms and she surrendered.   
  
       Sometimes, she thought, surrender, like a military retreat, was a tactical move.  
       

His fingers found the bruised ribs on her back and the ache in her spine and she moaned from pain, not pleasure, against the side of his neck where she had been frantically trying to output some of the tension building in her own body. He growled, low and deep, a sound and sensation that vibrated through her entire body and she shuddered against him, feeling her entire body coil and rise at his sound.

       

“Tash?” he managed to say.

       

“Hard landing,” she gasped.

       

In a swift movement, he lifted her up and she wrapped her legs around his waist. He kissed her and turned, carrying her towards her bedroom without breaking precious contact with her mouth. He tossed her down on her unmade bed and leaned over her, nipping at her lower lip. She groaned then, from pleasure, not pain, and said, “Get on with it, Clint.”

       

“No,” he replied, returning to his ministrations. “You’re going to beg for it, Tasha.”

       

Fuck. She wanted to say she wouldn’t, that she didn’t want to beg, but she did and she knew how he could make her beg. She growled back at him, “Like hell I am.”

       

“That’s your problem, Tash,” he said, pausing to pull off his own shirt. “You give me a challenge. I rise to it. When will you learn?”

       

“You’re certainly rising to this one,” she replied dryly, lifting her hips to grind against his. “Too many clothes, Barton.”

       

His replying grin was wolfish and his grey eyes were bright in the low light. “You’ll beg, Tasha. You said compromise you, and compromised you’ll be.”

       

A very long time ago, Natasha wouldn’t have known that the same person who fucked you could also make love to you, and someone could be simultaneously gentle and rough. She wouldn’t have known that rough sex could feel like he was worshipping her body. She wouldn’t have expected that either of them could slow down and make love, have sex that did not involve biting or blood or walls or bruises. Not that they were doing it now, but when he had her pinned against the bed and her body and her mind were screaming yes, it always surprised her that he could later pull her up against him, call her baby, and it could be painfully sweet, and just as satisfying. She never thought that fucking would be anything other than a means to an end. She never thought that being fucked could be romantic. She never thought she could be a romantic. But a part of her was. And it came out strangely, but at least Clint understood her. Now was not a long time ago. Now Natasha understood that sex and fucking and making love could all be the same thing and all come from the same person and all mean something much more than getting information for a mission. Or, from a longer time ago, a requirement in certain relationships. It was a revelation: she was there, beneath him, around him, with him inside of her, with his mouth on her and her fingers on him, and their bodies together, because she wanted to be there, because she could be there. Because this was, ultimately, Clint.

       

And when she came around him, her fingers digging into his back, shuddering and shivering against him, and when he came inside of her, his mouth capturing hers in gratitude, she wished she had the words to explain that to him. But he had taken her strength for the night, and she could feel the deep exhaustion in his own body when he fell onto the bed next to her. They lay there for a long moment, not speaking, her fingers tracing the planes of his face, the scars on his chest and arms. He gave her a faint smile when she found the one from when she shot him after he shot her when they first met in an obscure village in Russia when she was still with the Black Widow ops.

       

She leaned forward and kissed it, murmuring softly, “Thank you for the call you made.”

       

“It was the right one,” he whispered in reply, smoothing her hair. “Compromised?”

       

She smiled slightly. “Enough. You’re out of practice, Barton.”

       

He laughed, not even slightly insulted. “Maybe I am. I’ll work on it.”

       

“You do that,” she replied.

       

He slid closer, his nose brushing hers and her eyes having trouble focusing on him. He said, “So did we give up on that whole, ‘no more sleeping together’ business?”

       

She exhaled slowly. That answer was complicated. She said, “I need to go shower.”

       

His lips pressed together and he nodded slowly. “Okay.”

       

She rolled out of bed and walked to the bathroom, leaving the door open behind her. She had a thing about closed doors. She heard Clint sigh and roll over as she started the shower. He wouldn’t join her, not without an invitation. He knew her rules. She stepped under the warm rain of water, closed her eyes, and exhaled slowly. She needed this. She needed the space in the shower. She needed the water to cleanse her. She needed time to think. The answer to his question was complicated, but she wasn’t playing fair if she let him back in tonight, and then cut him off again. And she had been right. She had been compromised by him being taking by Loki. When she pursued him when he was possessed, she understood, she was facing the possibility of killing him. But she had done everything she could not to kill him, and had succeeded in what the doctors labeled “cognitive recalibration” which was a fancy way of saying that concussions ended possession. If she was going to be that compromised without sharing a bed with Barton, perhaps she may as well reap the benefits.

       

When the water ran cold and she stepped out, toweling her body dry and pulling her hair into a messy bun, she found that Barton was frowning at his cellphone. He glanced up at her and blinked, shaking his head.

       

“What?” she asked, climbing into bed.

       

“You have no idea how gorgeous you are,” he murmured, barely glancing up at her, “when you’re pouting and in a tshirt and your hair’s all tangled.”

       

“Going all romantic on me, Barton?” she asked lightly. She leaned over and peered at his phone. “What’s so concerning?”

       

“Someone broke into Bruce’s lab,” Clint said with a sigh, turning off his cellphone, putting it on the nighttable beside him and flopping back on the bed, an arm over his head. He ran a hand down her arm and tugged at it. She allowed him to pull her down to the bed so they were facing each other again. “Didn’t get far. Security went off and he escaped. But still. Strange. No one goes after Bruce. He’s quiet and underground. But it seems strange, doesn’t it? Your first mission after New York and it’s fucked up by someone else taking out your mark. Bruce moves back to NY and takes over a small lab in a dusty basement in Queens and someone breaks in. That’s a lot of attention we’re getting.”

       

“You don’t think it’s coincidence,” Natasha remarked, trying to find the connections Clint seemed to be making. “But it could be.”

       

Clint made a face at her. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

       

“If you think of something, tell me,” Natasha said in the long pause that came after. She reached over with a leg and slung it over his. She closed her eyes. “But I can’t think of anything.”

       

“Of course,” he whispered in reply. “You going to tell me how you hurt your back?”

         
“Bad landing off a roof in Buenos Aires,” Natasha said quietly after a moment, opening one eye to watch his reaction. His face didn’t flinch. Bad. He was working hard to control himself. She said, “If it helps, I asked everyone to keep it from you. You seemed to be having a hard time with New York and I thought maybe doing surveillance and covering the rescue crews was helping. I didn’t want to pull you away.”  
       

“It wasn’t your call to make, Tasha,” he retorted, his voice low and stung.

       

Natasha propped herself up on an elbow and ran a hand down the side of his face, down his jaw, to his chin. She said, “I know. I am sorry.”

       

He relaxed then and she released him, falling back onto the bed. She closed her eyes and the last thing she remembered as her breaths grew deeper and she fell asleep, was Clint telling her there had to be a connection between Buenos Aires and the lab in Queens.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: sexual content below

Natasha woke the way most people fall asleep: slowly, her breathing getting deeper and deeper as her awareness grew. She fell asleep suddenly, shallow breaths, her biology and engineering never letting her brain settle into the deepest cycle of sleep where she would be most vulnerable. Clint always found it fascinating to watch this process, fascinating to know that where they were alike ended at her ability to sleep and his inability to sleep, fascinated, as always, by her. She had, in her sleep, curled around him, snaking her legs through his, her arms around his chest, her head nestled under his arm. That was unusual. Natasha Romanova did not cuddle.

****

But in the morning light, he could see the deep dark purple bruise stretched over her spine and across her back to touch her ribs on the side, and he thought about how she was unconsciously seeking comfort from him, how a mark got away from her, and how he felt, deeply, that there was a connection between Bruce’s lab and Natasha’s missed mark, and he decided that he wouldn’t tease her for the change in her rules of engagement. Besides, he told himself, be happy with what you get. He had drifted off once or twice before jerking awake and everytime he awoke, she had surfaced suddenly, wide-eyed and tense, until he reassured her it was just him, and she had instantly fallen back asleep.

  
When she had finally woken up, she was bright eyed and fierce from the get-go. Clint needed coffee. She rolled out of bed, pulling her tshirt over her head and tossing it to the side, all crimson waves and curves and bare skin, and Clint groaned into his hand. She smirked at him over her shoulder and sauntered, dramatically, to the bathroom to brush her hair out and brush her teeth. He closed his eyes and told himself to get under control and then he rolled out of bed, yanked on clothes, and leaned on the bathroom door, watching her in the mirror. She turned around and sat up on the bathroom vanity, brushing her teeth and watching him with those painfully bright green eyes. She knew exactly what she was doing to him and she did not care. Or maybe she did care.  
         
“Morning,” he drawled slowly, raising his eyebrows at her slightly.  
         
“You can come in,” she said awkwardly around the toothbrush, giving him a wide smile full of toothpaste. She dangled her legs and kicked them a bit. Clint’s eyes traveled low, and then he cleared his throat and met her eyes defiantly. Those eyes were laughing at him, he was sure of it.  
         
“Why thank you,” he said, coming in and reaching, instinctively, for the toothbrush he kept next to her sink. It wasn’t there. But Natasha’s was. He stared at the toothbrush in her mouth. His. He said, “Gross. You don’t know where my mouth’s been.”  
         
Her eyes were electric. They sent shockwaves to his groin and he was having a hard time thinking with a naked Natasha sitting on the bathroom vanity and brushing her mouth with his toothbrush. She paused, taking the toothbrush out of her mouth and pretending to study it. “You’re right. Your mouth hasn’t been there in awhile.”  
         
“Natasha Alianova Romanova, you’re going to make me late for work,” Clint hissed through his teeth, stepping between her legs and kissing her mouth hard, fierce, painfully. He wanted to bruise her lips. She arched into him and her breasts brushed against his chest and every coherent, rational thought that Clint had fled his brain, as did all of the blood.  
         
“Maybe we need to take care of you,” she mumbled against the bruising pressure of his mouth. He felt her hands reaching for him, and then around him and he bit down on her lower lip.  
         


Her cellphone went off in the bedroom and she stilled beneath his hands. He bowed his head against her forehead and exhaled angrily. “Tell me that’s not important.”

****  
** **

She bit her lip, and murmured against his cheek, “SHIELD’s ringtone.”

****  
** **

“That didn’t answer my question,” he replied and she responded, sliding against him and her hand closing around him again. He managed one thankful smile against her neck before she was sending him spiraling upwards or downwards, he could never tell but she could bring a man to his knees with her touch, her body, her mouth, and she on her knees in front of him was strangely disconcerting sight. And when he came and she rose to kiss him with her salty mouth, he whispered into her mouth, “Christ, Natasha.”

****  
** **

“I’ve never been mistaken for him before,” she whispered back. Ever witty. Ever sassy. Ever Natasha.

****  
** **

Her cell went off again and Natasha had to duck her head to keep from laughing. Clint tugged her against him and he said, “I’m going to kill Fury.”

****  
** **

“Biggest cockblock on the planet,” Natasha said, bending and picking up the toothbrush on the floor. She handed it to Clint with a wicked smile. “Good morning.”

****  
** **

And for the second time that morning, Clint watched her walk away from him, all blushing skin, tangled red curls, curves, and sultry smiles. It wasn’t legal. It couldn’t be. He stared at his toothbrush in his hand, shrugged, rinsed it under the faucet and brushed his teeth.

****  
** **

When he finished brushing his teeth, he walked back into the bedroom and found Natasha frowning at her laptop as she took notes, her cellphone tucked between her chin and her ear. She had gotten halfway dressed—she had underwear and a shirt on at least, and half of her hair was brushed—but whatever Fury was telling her over the phone was important enough that she had stopped. Clint sat on the other side of the bed and watched out of the corner of his eye. The benefit of being an archer and a sniper to boot was his eyesight was excellent. She was looking at the profile of a young man, a little younger than Natasha was herself. His death had recently been added to his profile. He had died that morning. Natasha seemed to have known him.

****  
** **

“No sir,” she said, looking sideways at Clint. “I didn’t keep track of him after we handled his father. That was my first assignment, sir. That was years ago.”

****  
** **

Clint remembered the young man now. Not by his photo but by his name. Ten years prior, on her first mission, Natasha had marked a man named Luis Salvatoro who was trafficking young women from Eastern Europe into Italy, Greece, and occasionally, Canada and the US. It was supposed to be a deep cover assignment. Her youthful looks, her beauty, and her Russian all lent itself to being a fairly innocuous first deep cover. Clint hadn’t been allowed to handle her—ironically, he was considered to be too close to her then, long before they started sleeping together—but he had been in the area and had kept close tabs on her. He had covered her the night that Luis had brought her to his house as his special find. He wanted to teach her a few things, the man had told her. Once Natasha extracted all the information she could from him, she had killed him. It hadn’t been explicitly required, but she had felt he was not one who would relent while he was alive. After the mission, Natasha had thrown up several times in the bushes outside. She had not expected to kill for SHIELD so soon after recovering from the Red Room’s programming. She hadn’t let Clint touch her and she had disappeared for a week afterwards, off the grid entirely, until she calmly showed up for a morning debriefing like nothing had happened.

****  
** **

Luis Salvatoro apparently had a son. Marco Salvatoro. Who was dead. Marco who, Natasha was explaining, had been a child when his father was killed and he hadn’t even been raised with his father. The Salvatoros were divorced and Marco lived in southern Italy with his mother and grandparents.

****  
** **

“Yes, sir, we’ll be right in,” said Natasha, rolling her eyes. “Yes, absolutely.”

****  
** **

Clint winced. So SHIELD knew he was here. He should have guessed. Natasha hung up, stared at him, and huffed softly. “They’re tracking you. We should have guessed it but—“

****  
** **

“Do you care?” he interrupted. “If they know?”

****  
** **

She made a face at him. “Of course not. But I trust SHIELD as far as I can throw their collective shadowy selves. Just know that you’re never off the grid for them right now.”

****  
** **

“What’d he say?” asked Clint, getting out of bed and trying to find his shoes. They were across the room. How, he wasn’t quite sure, but he remembered the results of that undressing and it was worth the hunt for the shoes.

****  
** **

“Son of someone I killed is dead with a note that says, “Ask the Widow why”,” Natasha replied smoothly, pulling on black skinny jeans and putting on her shoes. She shrugged. “Just strange that they knew it was me…Salvatoro wasn’t short on enemies. It was so hush hush and it’s been years. And Marco was just a kid. He…”

****  
** **

Clint watched her from across the room, knowing what was going through her head. The kid was not involved and she was blaming herself if he was killed to send a message to her. She was a spy and an assassin. She was not used to messages being sent to her through bodies. Usually it was something more subtle: someone knowing who she was despite her cover, a game that she would play with another assassin in terms of getting to a mark first, but no one killed to send a message to her, especially a vague message.

****  
** **

He said quietly, “Let’s get to headquarters.”

****  
** **

Natasha didn’t do reassurance. She processed things her way, on her time. It was the best way he knew how to support her. She took a deep breath, just one, and nodded, her mask back on. “Yep, let’s go. We’ll get coffee on the way.”

****  
** **

They reached the steps to the subway in the height of rushhour. The trains had largely been running since the disaster of almost three weeks ago and life, around the destroyed areas, was slowly repairing itself. People streamed past them down the stairs and into the darkness. Clint balked, staring at the entrance, and Natasha stopped and watched him patiently. Hawks didn’t go underground. He didn’t belong underground. He hated being underground. When Fury had stalked down to the Tesseract and been disappointed to find Hawkeye uninterested, aloof, and cold, even, he had failed to take into consideration that there were a half a dozen equally well trained people who didn’t mind being underground and maybe he would have been more prepared for Loki if he wasn’t too busy feeling like the ceiling would fall down on him (which it almost did, for the record). Hawks didn’t belong underground.

****  
** **

Natasha said, not unkindly, “Meet you there?”

****  
** **

He gave her a look and she shrugged. “It’s fine.”

****  
** **

He frowned and said, “See you there.”

****  
** **

She gave him a small, shy smile and turned, pattering down the stairs, and disappearing into the darkness. He stared after her, trying to ignore the tug in his chest that told him he should stay with her, she could be in danger, and she needed him. Finally, after a few minutes, he turned and moved down the street, ducked down an alley, and began to cross the city the best way he knew how: in the sky.

****  
** **

She beat him to the office, naturally. But as he slipped down the hall and stepped into the room, her back was to him and she was saying to Tony, “He’s right here, Tony, you can harass him instead of me.”

****  
** **

Tony looked up, met Clint’s eyes, and then swung back to Natasha, demanding, “How did you know? How did you know that? He was perfectly silent! I don’t understand, was your spidey sense tingling?”

****  
** **

“That’s Parker,” Natasha replied calmly. She glanced over her shoulder. “Did you take the long route, Hawkeye?”

****  
** **

“The scenic route which you missed by going in a small metal box underground with several hundred other people,” he retorted lightly. He took a seat and turned it side to side. “Anything new?”

****  
** **

“No,” Natasha huffed. “Tony is waiting for a copy of the note to do handwriting analysis on it. For some reason, the idiots in foreign rights are STILL arguing with the Italian police over access to the note. I keep telling them, if they give me the go ahead, I will go get them the note but everyone seems to have a problem with that.”

****  
** **

“Go figure,” Clint replied. He looked at Tony who was busy doodling some design on a napkin. “How are the repairs to Stark Tower?”

****  
** **

“I think you owe me money for that,” Tony said, his eyes focused on his sketching. “It wouldn’t have happened without you, you know. I’m surprised you’re not cited as responsible for reparations.”

****  
** **

Clint winced and Natasha whirled out of her chair, pointing a pen at Tony’s throat so fast that even Clint said warningly, “Natasha.”

****  
** **

Tony met her eyes evenly, to his credit, and said, “Just because it hurts doesn’t mean it’s true, so put your crazy ninja Russian assassin skills back in your pocket for a rainy day and take a seat.”

****  
** **

“Tasha,” Clint repeated quietly. He was fairly sure that killing other Avengers while not under outside control was against the rules and at least, frowned upon.

****  
** **

She pointed the pen at him and said, “See? This is why.” And he knew she meant that she was compromised. But it flooded him with warmth and affection, instead of anger. He watched her carefully and only sat when she said. She glared at Tony and said, “We also wouldn’t have won without Hawkeye.”

****  
** **

“Or me. Or Natasha. Or Tony. Or Steve. That’s why it’s called a team.” added Bruce, looking exhausted as he came into the room. He slid into a seat. “We have a problem. There’s been a direct threat against Natasha. It was left in the lab this morning.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Such a stupid, empty phrase. A threat against Natasha. Of course, there was a threat against Natasha. The whole world was a threat to her. She had known this from the day her parents died in that housefire and the Red Room took her in. There was no escaping it. There were little minor threats, things she knew, instinctively, that she could not control: house fires, natural disasters, car accidents, the germs on the railings of the subway stairs, stepping in dog shit. And there were the major threats, the ones she danced with regularly for her job: being injured or killed, being caught or held hostage, drowning, falling, being trapped, any of those possibilities existed on a daily basis. The world was full of threats and her job’s definition was a direct threat to her. Because she was, wasn’t she, Natasha, at heart, and Black Widow on the job? Wasn’t the Black Widow the greatest direct threat to Natasha that ever existed? Stupid, overdramatic words.

  
But their effect on the room was dramatic. Tony did not banter or say anything inappropriate though witty. And Clint was still. He was so still that it was like he was perched on the roof of a skyscraper, arrow drawn, watching with those gray eyes, like the still sky before a storm. Natasha wanted to reach out, touch his arm, try to convey something through a simple graze of her fingertips, but he looked like her touch might be like releasing a bowstring and he would fire off like one of his arrows, deadly, dangerous, unstoppable, explosive. One of the things she loved most about Clint could be his undoing right now.  
  
Natasha swiveled in her chair. “What was the threat?”  
  
“Here,” Bruce tossed it in front of her on the table.  
  
Clint moved like lightning, faster than she had seen him move before, but Natasha was faster. He should have known. She lifted the paper away from and glared at him. “My threat, my note.”  
  
He glowered at her and took a seat. Natasha unfolded the note and instantly, before she read the words, she recognized the handwriting. It hit her, jolted her backwards in time, snapped the fourth rib on her left side, reverberated in her head like a concussion. She took a rattling breath, told herself to focus, and read the words.  
  
Natashka,  
Six.  
All my love,  
Shosta  
  
It was always Clint, but it was always Clint because at one point, Shosta was there and he just wouldn’t leave. Until he left. Until he died. Until he was supposed to be gone. Gone forever. They had gone their separate ways and somewhere along the line, he had died. A plane accident they said, and she had gone to the site, not believing them that the villian of her teenage years was truly dead and gone. And it was a plane crash, bones that tested positive for his DNA, and dental records that matched. For her, at the time, that had been enough evidence. Now, staring at the letter, she was not so sure. Was it a prank from someone back at the Red Room? They had agreed to leave her alone, as an organization, but that did not mean individuals did not seek to undermine her--or to kill her. Or perhaps, in all that she knew about the world now, without the Red Room in her head all the time, she would not have been as naive to believe that the dental records she was given access to were his legitimate records, that the DNA test could not be falsified.  
  
“What does it say?” asked Bruce.  
  
It was only then that Natasha realized that it was written in Russian using the Cyrllic alphabet and Bruce did not read Russian. She dropped the note, staring at him. “Am I the first to see this? Was it checked for prints and contaminants?”  
  
“Yes. None,” Bruce raised his eyebrows at her. “We’re not new to this, Natasha.”  
  
She frowned at the note. “It says, “Natashka, Six. All my love, Shosta.”  
  
Clint reached over and took the note and this time she let him. He traced the letters. He spoke and understood Russian, mostly because of her, but did not read it. But she could see him working his way through the sounds of the letters and frowning at the message. He looked up, quizzical at her. He knew who Shosta was.  
  
 _Sarajevo, seven years ago. They were sharing a hotel room for the first time, separate beds, and they were creeping around the tension in the room, whispering and being polite and courteous to the point of being stiff and uncomfortable._  
  
 _But when they watched a movie that referenced Russian roulette, Natasha quietly said, “I’ve played it. It used to be thing between my husband--ex-husband, late husband, something like that. I don’t know how you say it in English--and I.”_  
  
 _Clint had jerked upright at the word ‘husband’ and was staring at her, open mouthed and confused. He glanced at her left hand which she curled into a fist. He said, “That’s not in your file.”_  
  
 _She had burst into laughter at that and finally risen, pulling her knees to her chest and grinned at him. “So you’ve studied my file?”_  
  
 _He glared at her. “Of course. You’re my partner.”_  
  
 _She shook her head. “I haven’t read your file.”_  
  
 _“Maybe you should have,” he replied sharply._  
  
 _She shrugged. “I know that I trust you to cover my back and not be stupid. That’s enough for me. I don’t need to know why you are the way you are or any of the other bullshit they put in those reports.”_  
  
 _He was quiet for a long pause after that, his eyes lowered to where his fingers traced the lines in the sheets of his bed. When he lifted those gray eyes, they felt like burnished metal of a gun pointing at her. He said, “You were saying you had a husband.”_  
  
 _“The Red Room matched us. You know. So we could,” Natasha shrugged. “Anyways, he was my age. His name was Alexei Shostakov but everyone called him Shosta. He was kind at first but we began to train using each other, you know. Running simulations, setting up fake drops. We started to say it was to make us better at what we did, but Shosta...he got very into it. He started refusing to spar anyone but me. He was really frustrated by the fact that we were evenly matched. But when we were eighteen or so, we were still evenly matched, except he had the advantage of sheer body weight. He started to push me so far when he would pin me that I would black out. He’d suffocate me or beat the daylights out of me when I was pinned to the point where I was suffering memory loss. I could still get him in half the fights, but that only made the times when he won worse. So I started to lose, on purpose, to balance it out, make it easier on myself.”_  


_“They started sending me out on missions solo then too, to seduce men and kill them, and he would want all of the sick details when I got home. And then he started playing Russian roulette with me. We had blanks, but still, the force of the pressure sometimes could still make you dizzy. He was out of control. He would go on missions and kill everyone not just those who needed to be killed. He began doing drugs...that’s when the Red Room pulled him away and sent him off to be trained separately from me. They told me it was only for a little while but I was grateful. He died in a training accident in a fighter jet a year later.”_

  
_Clint had studied her for a long minute, holding her gaze. Then he had flopped back on the bed, turned the sound back on the TV, and said, partially to the ceiling and glancing only once over at her. “I’m glad you told me he was dead because I was ready to scrap this mission and go kill him instead.”_  
  
It was the last time they spoke of Shosta.  
  
It was the last time she had thought about Shosta seriously.  
  
She met Clint’s eyes now and said with a shrug, “It could be a farce, someone trying to mess with me.”  
“What does it mean?” asked Tony, taking the letter from Clint.  
  
“What does what mean?” asked Steve, coming into the room and taking a seat next to Tony. He leaned over and frowned. “What is this?”  
  
“A threat, or at least, I assume, against Natasha,” filled in Bruce when Natasha was still not saying anything.  
  
“Why do you think it’s a threat?” asked Tony.  
  
“Because if it was a love letter, they wouldn’t have smashed up Bruce’s lab just to leave sweet words,” reasoned Steve calmly.  
  
Clint and Natasha’s eyes met across the table and he looked away, his lips trembling into a small smile, the first emotion she had seen flicker across his face and it reassured her that he too found that comical. Breaking things and then leaving a love letter in the disaster actually sounded precisely like the way Natasha and Clint operated. But he wouldn’t know the meaning of six and he had never called her Natashka. That pet name was Shosta’s alone, though Natasha reasoned that others may know of it.  
  
“Six refers to the number of rounds in a revolver,” said Clint, his voice smooth and crisp.  
  
“And Natashka is a,” Natasha added hesitantly, “a pet name, my ex-husband used to call me. It’s the diminutive version of my name.”  
  
“And Shosta is then,” said Bruce slowly.  
  
“Your husband. I remember,” said Steve, watching Natasha with sharp eyes. Sometimes, Natasha thought he was not given enough credit. He was a puppy in a room of dogs sometimes, but he was also the kindest when he said the harshest truths. She could trust Steve not to wield any part of her past against her like a weapon.  
  
Clint pressed his knuckles against his mouth and his voice was muffled. “So is he challenging you to a game of roulette?”  
  
“Shosta is dead,” Natasha said firmly, though she was not sure if she believed that anymore.  
  
Clint lifted his hand free of his mouth. “You still believe that?”  
  
Natasha shrugged slightly and paced the room, her arms crossed over her chest. “I don’t know anymore.”  
  
“What are the chances that he’s still alive?” asked Steve.  
  
“One hundred percent,” said Tony, pointing at the letter. “How many other people would call you Natashka, reference an obscure allusion to the number of rounds a gun holds, and put it somewhere where a friend of yours would find it? You can probably tick them off on one hand but I’m betting it’s actually just one finger.”  
  
“The probability of it being someone else is extremely low,” Natasha admitted, looking out the window. “But why now? Why after all these years? It’s been eleven years since I left the Red Room.”  
  
Eleven years since the Red Room. Six years since she was kidnapped, programmed again, and Clint had to do his own cognitive recalibration on her. Seven years since Sarajevo and she last spoke of Shosta. Six years since she began sharing her bed with Clint. Twelve years since Shosta was declared dead. Thirteen since she last saw him. This was how she measured her life, in landmarks in a minefield of memory, tripping back and forth between them and trying not to set off the explosions of everything that happened in between.  
  
Clint shook his head. “Is the trigger as important as what his next step is? What does the six mean?”  
  
“Six moves, but he could appear at any one of them,” mused Steve, still turning over the paper. He looked up to all of them staring at him. “I’m right aren’t I?”  
  
“It’s logical,” Natasha muttered. She rubbed her forehead. “So now to decide if the moves he made were already counted or not.”  
  
“No. That was loading the gun,” Clint shook his head. “Buenos Aires. Rome. The lab. That’s all loading the gun. Preparing you for the game. This is going to be some sort of sick twisted--”  
  
“Barton,” Natasha said sharply, watching him wind up. He huffed, glared at her, but took a deep breath, his shoulders relaxing slightly. She relaxed at that. “Perhaps there’s a pattern in what he’s done so far, particularly types of missions I went on, and maybe that’s related and we can predict his next move.”  
  
Tony opened a screen. “Yeah, I’ll work on that. Patterns do naughty things to me.”  
  
“Too much information,” said Bruce lightly. He glanced at Natasha. “Do you want to meet him at the next move?”  
  
“He may or may not be there,” Natasha pointed out. “But I should. That’s the whole point. If I don’t make a move, if I don’t play, he’ll escalate.”  
“How do you know?” asked Steve.  
  
“That’s his MO,” Clint said stiffly from the side of the room. He frowned at Natasha. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m right.”  
  
She pressed her lips together and surveyed him. She said in a low voice, “You have nothing to be jealous of and you know that.”  
  
He snorted. “Tasha,” he said, using a nickname he rarely used in public, “it’s not jealousy. It’s a strong overwhelming desire to put the man in the ground where I--we--thought he was and to make sure he stays there. Don’t push me.”  
  
She almost retorted she wasn’t tempting him when Tony said, “That’s great and all but take your lovers’ spat outside. Some of us are trying to solve your personal problems in peace and quiet.”  
  
“That’s true,” Steve pointed out, watching Natasha warily. “Is this an Avengers problem?”  
  
“Yes,” said Clint immediately.  
  
“Loverboy does not get a vote,” said Tony.  
  
“Tony,” said Steve, Natasha and Bruce at the same time, rolling their eyes.  
  
Bruce shook his head. “He’s targeting her former assignments for SHIELD. This is definitely our problem.”  
  
Tony, to Natasha’s surprise, nodded once, curtly, “I agree.”  
  
Steve shrugged. “I’ll support the decision.”  
  
Clint huffed. “While Tony’s finding a pattern, I’m going to go punch the shit out of something in the gym.”  
  
Natasha turned, opened her mouth to offer to join him, and he pointed at her and said, “No. I need to punch things without you standing around.”  
  
And it felt very much like a punch to the stomach when he stalked out of the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is where I take canon and go, "I like this, but not this, and this, but not that, and let's use this for my own good."
> 
> Thanks for being patient through it!


	5. Chapter 5

Punching things was the least of what Clint wanted to do. He wanted to kill things. How long had it been since he felt this way? How long since he fantasized direct pleasure in killing someone? He hadn’t thought that in the aftermath of Loki’s madness and the attack on NYC that he could still derive a sick twisted perverted rush from imagining death. But Shosta. Oh, Clint remembered Shosta. Six years he had hated the man and dammit, he could justify it so she could shove her “you don’t have to be jealous, Clint” up her gorgeous ass. And if she followed him, so help him, he would have to tell her that because right now, the desire to protect her and tell her to stay home while they tracked down Shosta was flooding his veins and he knew nothing would ruin their relationship faster than him telling her that. But fuck if he was going to let her run around the world playing a crazy man’s game while the crazy man picked the where and when for their meeting. Unacceptable.  
  
But then. The mere fact that Natasha had a husband come back from the dead was unacceptable.   
  
Yes, he really need to punch things.   
  
The difference between SHIELD and the Avengers was ambiguous and fluid, a shadowy difference that was only beginning to define itself since the attack on New York (why, why was it always New York--if it could be Prague or Paris, that would be so much more convenient: Clint liked those cities much better). They did assignments for SHIELD, and they did their own assignments. SHIELD met wherever they called the Avengers. The Avengers, however, worked out of the Stark Tower now. Mostly, actually, Tony demanded it because he kept throwing VICTONY parties in the days afterwards as a method of keeping everyone fed and hydrated (read: drunk) during rescue and recovery.   
  
For everyone but Tony’s pleasure, a gym was installed on a lower floor. When Tony first showed them all the gym, he had Natasha log in first, placing her eye against the scanner and it beeped as it passed over her retina and Clint remembered how for a moment, he was utterly jealous of a piece of Stark’s stupid technology but that faded fast in the shadow of what Tony said to Natasha next, low, because he hadn’t been joking, and he hadn’t been trying to push Clint’s buttons, or Natasha’s. He said it low and fast, like he did when he was saying something honest, and he hadn’t touched her, like he knew how much she hated casual touch.   
  
“This is a thank you for helping me out of my head all those years ago.”  
  
Sometimes, in small moments like that, after a disaster, after Natasha and him had been pushing each other apart for months, after he had been responsible for so much destruction, when he had crawled into some dank hole in some back alley of Manhattan and drank himself until he could no longer fumble an arrow out of a quiver and to his bow, he needed to be reminded that every one of them had hit some dark terrible place. They were called super but the second word was human and as cocky, arrogant, and bastardly as Tony could be, he was still trying to make amends for the destruction he wrought in his public and private lives years prior.  
It made him feel less alone.  
  
And that memory stayed with him over the last few weeks. Every time the door scanned his eye, he thought of Natasha. And when the door opened, he wondered if the gym too could relieve him of his guilt.  
  
So far, not so much.  
  
There was not enough physical activity to calm his mind or steady him. He boxed, he ran, he even climbed the damn rock wall that was put in for him and Natasha though he hadn’t ever seen her scale (and he didn’t really want to. There were only so many things she could best him at.) But while his mind stayed wide open and chaotic, he found himself breathing easier and steadier when he fell into a rhythm of focusing on his speed, his form, his strength, anything other than everything else that was occurring in the stark tower.  
  
“Are you going to go all day?” asked Bruce leaning against a wall and folding his arms. He frowned. “You should watch it. You haven’t bounced back from Loki’s possession yet.”  
  
“I know,” panted Clint, throwing himself at the wall again and racing up it to slap the bell at the top and scaling down as fast as possible. He repeated it, and pulled an imaginary bow off his shoulder and fired an imaginary arrow, balancing himself against the wall.  
  
“You’re missing the wind force of the side of the building,” Bruce added helpfully.  
  
Clint jumped the entire way to the ground and glared. “Look, I’m going to be nice and not threaten you because this building’s made of glass and you know what they say about green men in glass houses.”  
  
Bruce’s eyes flickered coldly. “Thanks. Yeah.”  
  
Clint threw himself up the wall again. And again. And Bruce didn’t leave. Clint finally said, “What?”  
  
“We found the pattern,” Bruce said calmly.  
  
Clint glanced at the clock on the wall. “That was fast.”  
  
“Tony’s fast,” Bruce said shortly and shrugged. “JARVIS did most of the work.”  
  
“Thank you, sir,” said JARVIS.  
  
“What’s the pattern?”  
  
He didn’t want to know, but Bruce didn’t know Clint as well as Natasha did, as well as a few others did.  
  
“Cases where women were being traded and the marks were estranged fathers,” Bruce said. “Surprisingly, when you take all of Natasha’s cases, and you boil it down, there are only six of those.”  
  
“How does he know what she’s handled?” Clint asked, mostly to himself, running a hand through his sweaty hair. He groaned. “Fuck. Okay. I need to shower and then I’ll come up. Give me five.”  
  
“I’ll give you ten. See you soon.” Bruce paused on his way out the door, turned, grinned, and said, “Welcome back. First mission since you know. The disaster.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Clint, trying not to add, thanks for the reminder, douchebag, at the end of his sentence.   
  
He walked upstairs rather than take the elevator to the floor above where the apartments were. He had one. It wasn’t his. More, it was a room with a bathroom and kitchenette that Tony let him use the first time Clint stumbled to the Stark Tower drunk after “the disaster” and since then Clint’s just been using it. He figures Tony probably doesn’t even notice and even then, the man didn’t need the space. If JARVIS told Tony that Clint stumbled home here every night rather than his ratty apartment across the river, then so be it. Until he was told to leave, he was staying. Besides, if Natasha kicked him out, and she might (in all their years, they had never had a place that was theirs, but that was just like them, wasn’t it), he had to have somewhere to go. It had been months since he opened up his own apartment. Besides, he knew, if he went back there, there was nothing but dust and roaches and booze. They said your home was like your true self and weren’t they right. Here at least, it was a nondescript room, plain, bare, unadorned, a simple bed, with white sheets, and white tiles in the bathroom, a plain mirror, plain doorknobs. It was lacking in anything that would whisper to him of permanence. Nothing in this world was permanent.   
  
He stripped off his sweaty clothes, the same ones he wore to Natasha’s house last night, put on this morning, and then worked out in, and tossed them in a pile on the floor. He stepped into the shower, closed his eyes, and exhaled. He understood Natasha’s rules about the shower. He understood the need for space. He understood the sanctity of the shower. He understood that for people who maimed, and manipulated, and killed, and lied for a living, the need for sanctuary and belief was crucial to survival; but neither he nor Natasha believed in God, or at least not a god who believed in interference, and the shower was the closest place they came to having a sanctuary and that solitude was the closest thing they’d ever have to prayer and that cleanliness was the closest they’d ever come to redemption. Once, it was the one place in the universe that it was safe for him to think of all his mistakes and all of his regrets because he would step out of the shower, dry his body, and walk out of the bathroom to face the best decision he had ever made. It was dangerous to ask anyone, even Natasha, to carry the weight of that on their shoulders, but she knew, and she bore it well, even in the habitual winter of their quiet separation.   
  
Now, he dreaded stepping out of the bathroom. It felt like leaving bed on a cold winter morning when you went to sleep without socks on so you knew, you knew, like the way you already knew how to breathe, that your feet would be shocked by the cold air, that the floor would be like ice, and that your day would be terrible from the moment you rolled out of bed, dragging yourself to responsibility (because when you have an unusual skill set, your responsibilities are equally unusual) and misery. He dreaded leaving the shower.   
  
As he toweled himself dry and drew on clean clothes over his tired, ragged body, he heard the sound of the door opening softly and shutting with a gentle click. No footsteps. His heart did not pick up in pace at all so swiftly did he slide into his training. His bow was by the door, too far away for him to reach, but he had been practicing his close combat hand to hand skills recently after realizing that there would come a time in every conflict where he could no longer sit on top of buildings playing sniper with perfect, deadly aim.   
  
“It’s me,” came a low voice, taut like a bowstring, from outside the bathroom door. “Relax.”  
  
He opened the door, crossing his arms as he frowned at Natasha. “Particular reason you’re sneaking in?”  
  
She gave him a quick smile, “You used to like it when I snuck in.”  
  
He hated when she was right. He softened, slightly, and said quietly, “I didn’t know you knew where I was. I was off guard.”  
  
“Banner told me,” she replied, giving a very small shrug. “I just came back and --”  
  
“You went out?” He interrupted her.  
  
“Yes,” she raised her eyebrows. “I needed to run an errand.”  
  
“It’s not safe, Tasha,” Clint muttered, trying not to seem overly protective, and failing. “He could--”  
  
“He set the parameters. He won’t harm me outside of one of those cities. New York is not one of them. Breathe,” she told him, resting a hand on his chest.   
  
He inhaled and exhaled obediently and then rolled his eyes at her. “He could change them.”  
  
“He could,” she agreed but shrugged again. “He won’t. Not without telling me. He likes this being a game. A game’s no fun when the other side doesn’t know what they’re playing. Stakes. That’s what makes a game a game.”  
  
“Pardon me,” he said, leaning and pretending to study her face and tried to rub away a nonexistent smudge with his thumb while she gave him a concerned look. He looked apologetically at her, grinning. “Sorry, your homeland. It was showing right there on your face.”  
  
“Haha,” she retorted, giving him a small shove.   
  
“I learned a new joke about Russia,” he said, still smiling. “Actually, it’s about Ireland but I’m making it about Russia.”  
  
She crossed her arms over her chest (oh if there was a god, Clint loved him for that moment when she crossed her arms over her chest) and arched an eyebrow. “Let’s hear it.”  
  
“How many potatoes does it take to kill a Russian?” he asked, half not believing he was telling such a terrible joke. “Millions rotting in storage.”  
  
She rolled her eyes, shaking her head. “If you’re telling an artificial famine joke, make it about Ukraine, Barton.”  
  
“I forgot. Russians only have a sense of humor when it comes to laughing at Ukraine,” he laughed.   
  
“It’s so easy,” she remarked. She tilted her head slightly. “Would you like to hear a joke I heard growing up?”  
  
She never talked about growing up. Of course he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear every story she would ever tell. He shrugged nonchalantly. “Can’t be worse than what I just told.”  
  
“True,” she agreed and leaned forward, brushing his lips with hers. She whispered. “This is a terrible joke.”  
  
She pushed him against the doorframe, her fists gathering his shirt between her fingers, and he feels her hipbone bite into his. He stares at her holding his breath, watching her eyes flutter and watching her lips part. She whispered, “There were questionnaires for joining the Communist Party, which was stupid,” oh he loved the way she said that word, it brought the Russian out in her vowels and in the shapes around the consonants “because everyone had to be a member of the Communist. Still they did purges based off these questionnaires. One man reached this question, “What is your general attitude towards the Soviet Authority?” and he wrote down, “The same as to my wife.” When they asked him what he meant, he said, “First, I love her. Second, I fear her. And third, I wish I had another.”  
  
Clint started at her and then huffed out a short bark of laughter, wrapping an arm around to keep her close against him while he whispered in her ear, “That’s not a joke, Tasha, that’s a true story.”  
  
“You see what I mean, then,” she whispered back. “Even in the cruelest of places, there is still room for laughter and humor. So even this will pass.”  
  
“I know. We’ll catch the bastard,” Clint said gruffly.  
  
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I know we’ll catch him. I mean, even this part where you can’t get out of your own head. I told you. It’ll take time to level out. You’re not giving yourself time.”  
  
He let her go then and said, turning to shut off the light in the bathroom. “I know. Let’s go see what patterns Tony found and then I have a Russian with an equally bad sense of humor to hunt down.”  
  
“Oh no,” admonished Natasha, stepping back and shaking her red wavy hair, “his sense of humor is much worse.”  
  
“Wonderful,” grumbled Clint.  He brightened as they left his room. “Hey, what’s 50 meters long and eats potatoes?”  
  
“A Moscow line waiting for meat. I’ve heard that one before, Clint,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes.  
  
Her cellphone went off and she checked it as they walked down the hallway. Clint watched her out of the corner of his eye, watched her eyes widen and mouth tighten. His hands curled into fists. “What?”  
  
Wordlessly, she handed Clint the phone and he read the text on the screen.  
  
Tell birdboy to keep his hands off of you.  
  
“Huh,” Clint mused softly and then looked up to Natasha’s fiery look. He backed up, tossing her the cell that she deftly caught. “Hey, don’t look at me that way. I’m not doing anything.”  
  
“Not you, him,” she snapped. “He’s threatening you now? I’ll wring his neck myself.”  
  
“Yes, let’s not get overprotective and let’s level out now,” Clint pointed out dryly.   
  


“And he knows we’re back together,” muttered Natasha, her eyes searching the ceiling and finding the security cameras. Her green eyes glittered. She spun on her heel and stalked down the hallway.

 

Clint ran to catch up with her. “I think we should stay calm.”

 

“Calm is for people who are not about to kill their ex-husbands whom they thought were dead,” Natasha snapped.

 

“Yeah, but don’t set off Banner, or Tony, and it’s not like we haven’t heard those comments before, right?” Clint suggested as smoothly as possible.

 

She stopped, glared at him, and then stalked on. “And he shouldn’t call you birdboy.”

 

“That we can agree on.”

 


	6. Chapter 6

Natasha was not a people person. Her trust in the people around her came from her trust in their shared ideals, not in them as individuals. But the idea that Shosta had access to the Stark Tower’s intelligence system was stunning and was rendering her paranoid. She had to focus as she walked with Clint; her instincts told her to glare at every security camera they passed in case Shosta was watching but her training told her not to let him know that she understood he had access to the Tower yet. Perhaps he would get cocky, think she did not understand that his text was a threat. Perhaps he would get cocky and make a mistake. She hoped she was that lucky. Shosta was not one to play games lightly. He was playing for keeps. It was hard to tell at this time if keeps was death or back at his side, under the thumb of the Red Room. They had already done that once to her. She had no intention of letting it happen again. So when she passed people in the hallway, she listened for Russian accents. She glanced at their jewelry, their rings, their earrings, their necklaces, assessed them for the possibility of bugs or relevancy to Shosta or the Red Room, and made a mental catalogue of faces. 

Russian was a synonym for resourceful, after all.

Clint next to her seem unbalanced and unpredictable. He walked...tersely, was the only word she could find for it. If he was speaking, it’d be clipped and casual, like he expected her to take his words at face value. Now he was walking as if she should notice that his steps were light and his body relaxed, and not that he was rolling onto the balls of his feet, that his hands were at his sides, still, that he had checked the bow on his back twice just in the hallway. The world’s best sniper, the world’s best archer, yes, but capable, at the moment, of controlling his emotions, not in the least. 

She knew what it was like to have her mind taken over by others. She knew that intimately. She wished she didn’t but of all the people, she knew the best what Clint was experiencing. If anything, it made her feel more helpless than anything. An unbalanced Clint was dangerous for everyone. The Avengers, and even the ones that Natasha tried to avoid at all costs like “The Other Spider Guy”, had agreed that letting Clint have some space was the best method of letting him sort it out. If he was a child in modern day New York, and you know, wasn’t raised in a circus where being a stubborn oddball was considered par for the course, he would probably have oppositional defiance disorder but then again, Natasha would probably have some diagnosis of being neuroatypical in some fashion or another. Tony still hadn’t let her forget that in the middle of the battle she had focused on her inability to understand his idiopathic expression “I’m bringing the party to you”. 

But it was three weeks and he hadn’t sorted himself out. Clint was in the same place. He had done the soldier spy trick of wrapping the problematic part of his memory and existence up into a nice little box and putting it in a corner of his mind. They called it compartmentalizing in the Red Room. SHIELD called it “avoidance”. Semantics, really. 

Just before they reentered the room, Natasha laid a hand on Clint’s arm. He stiffened and turned his head slightly, watching her careful, his jaw tense. She studied him for a moment and said, “We’re in this together. We always are, Clint, even when we aren’t sleeping together.”

He relaxed, slightly, and said, “I know.”

“Good,” she said, dropping her hand and pushing open the door. 

Chaos. Chaos. Utter. Chaos. Natasha froze in the doorway, watching Tony trying to blast through Steve’s shield, while Banner quite literally was head-desking himself to a concussion or towards the Other Guy or away from the other guy, it was hard to tell. Parker, the blithering idiot was standing in the corner, slouched and texting or tweeting or doing something on his smartphone. He raised his eyes, glanced at Clint and Natasha, flashed them one quick, wicked smile, and lowered his eyes back down to his screen. There were two non-related people in the room, a young man and a young woman, both wearing sharp suits and looking utterly unalarmed which meant they were Stark Tower employees. They stood off to the side, watching with serene expressions. Natasha knew how hard and how long it took to be able to pull that practiced expression of ease to their faces. 

“Huh,” said Clint, amused, his eyes scanning the room. He crossed his arms and cast a bemused smirk sideways to Natasha. “I think we missed something.”

“Just a friendly bet!” yelled Tony.

“Not friendly!” yelled Steve.

“Stupid,” Bruce groaned from the table.

“Normal,” said Peter dryly, still not looking up.

“What the--” came a soft utter from behind Natasha as Pepper Potts slipped into the room. She had a cell to her ear. She said into the phone, “No, Thor, it’s not you. No, you don’t need to come back. Everything’s fine here. Yes, thank you. Of course, I’ll get you that file immediately. Yes. Okay. Next week. Goodbye.”

She hung up and looked at Natasha. “What’s going on?”

Natasha shrugged. “It’s finally back to normal. Or, whatever our new normal is going to be.”

She frowned though. She wasn’t quite sure they should be playing this close to so much glass. It was the one fault she could find with the Stark Tower. Too much glass. People in glass houses...ah, well, the Americans had a saying about it but Natasha would probably say that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw people which was exactly what Tony just did to Steve. Natasha flinched at the impact and she kept a wary eye on Banner who was still face down on the desk talking about all the things they had to accomplish before the end of the day and if only everyone would listen to him and stop fooling around and yes Tony I’m talking to you. And Natasha trusted Bruce about as far as she could throw him when the Other Guy was around and she had to agree with him. 

She strode towards Tony and Steve. Clint grabbed her arm and hissed, “Are you nuts?”

“Let go,” she said, only half turning her head. “And don’t you dare do that again.”

He dropped her arm again and glared at her. She ignored him and strode towards Tony. She stepped between him and Steve who was getting to his feet again. She raised one eyebrow, parted her lips, softened a hip, and said, “Algorithms.”

Tony’s suit’s head tilted slightly and he said, “Right. Algorithms.”

And like that, the suit was unraveling as mechanical things did: folding into itself and falling down to his feet into a small suitcase. Tony was still watching her, looking a little dazed and Natasha wanted to hit him upside the head. It had been too easy to play him. If he was ever captured and anyone ever trained in seduction found their way to the interrogation room, he was toast. But then, she reminded herself that as easily confounded Tony was, he was also incredibly smart and the information that he would be releasing would help ground him so he understood what she was doing.

Sure enough, as soon as he spread his fingers in the air and the information leapt up into midair in front of him, he looked up and said, “Miss Potts. This woman’s trying to seduce me.”

Pepper was made of sterner stuff. She smiled patiently at him. “And it worked. Now let’s go over the information.”

“Six cases,” explained Tony as Natasha stood behind him, crossing her arms and avoiding Clint who was pacing on the other side of the room, glaring at her and the information. “All involved marks who had children. All involved trafficking of women in some fashion or another.”

Natasha glanced over the list.

Jerusalem.  
Kyiv.  
Sarajevo.  
Barcelona.  
London.  
Mexico City.  
She said quietly, “And all missions in which I made a mistake.”

That stopped everyone. She looked around at them and shrugged. “We all make mistakes. Jerusalem, I was shot. Kyiv, I was captured by the Red Room again. Sarajevo, I was tailed, followed, and ended up having to kill more than just my mark and his guards. Barcelona, I let the mark escape. We never found him again. London...well. I was just doing general recon on a mark, keeping an eye on him, and nothing struck me as strange. Then he blew up a bus. Mexico City, I didn’t get to the girls in time. All of them died of drug overdoses in a basement in a slum.”

No one moved. Natasha said briskly, “Shosta would know that. It’s more likely that he picked them for mistakes and then found the other relationships. So the question is, how does he want to play?”

“We could not play,” suggested Steve.

“This isn’t a we,” snapped Natasha.

“Of course it is,” replied Bruce.

Natasha cast a glare around the room that made everyone but Pepper avoid her eyes. “That’s not your call. I appreciate the help figuring out the game he’s playing but I’m going to take care of this.”

“He wants it to be us,” Clint retorted sharply.

“How do you know?” shot back Natasha.

The temperature dropped. Everyone was very still. Clint said in a low voice, “He found Banner’s lab. If he wanted it to be a game just you played, he would have blown up your apartment and left it for you alone to find. He wants our involvement.”

“But I don’t,” she said.

“You don’t get to make that call,” he said. He lifted an eyebrow. “Compromised, remember?”

And for the first time in his life, Clint succeeded in getting a very faint blush to climb up Natasha’s cheeks. She pressed her lips together and glared at him. She couldn’t tell him how dangerous this was, that Shosta was playing for keeps or for dead, and that for someone as fragile as Clint was, this would quite literally be dancing with death. She couldn’t let him take this risk for her, not again, not after everything. She did not want Shosta anywhere near him. She did not want Clint to see her reliving her mistakes.

“Together, Natasha,” he replied a little calmer now. “You said it.”

She had. But she had changed her mind. Her lips thinned and she shook her head. “Not this time.”

“Not an option,” he repeated.

“How do you think he wants to play?” asked Pepper calmly. “Just show up.”

“I don’t know,” Natasha said, dragging her eyes from Clint to Pepper. “But that seems a good place to start.”

“I’ll pull up all the maps and information on the cases,” said Banner.

“I’ll get travel plans,” said Pepper.

“I’ll prepare a surveillance team,” said Parker from the corner.

“I’ll make a list of the twenty seven ways we can kill Shosta and tours of local wineries,” said Tony helpfully.

Clint said, “I have Natasha.”

And much to her horror, the others just nodded slightly, accepting that as a task. She crossed the room furiously, stopping in front of him, wordlessly hissing at him and trying to find the ways to yell at him but lacking anything in English or using language and she just wanted to -- 

“Don’t yell at me,” Clint murmured, his eyes holding hers. “Basement?”

The basement of Stark Towers, deep below the city, was connected to various tunnels. It was completely dark with no lights, various debris, a ton of pipes, and hazardous chemicals. It was their favorite place to practice stealth and spy vs spy. He was offering her an apology wrapped up in a way to blow off steam and frustration and the opportunity to pummel him into a bloody pulp which sounded like an excellent idea at the moment. But then, there were other memories of the basement. When Tony had first built the tower, Clint and Natasha had christened it, figuring it’d take Tony too long to get around to realizing he loved Pepper to do it himself. So there was that, in the basement, as well. 

She watched him warily. He said, “Coming?”

She nodded, slowly.  
Dark swallowed people. Natasha had seen it. She had seen people walk into the night and never return. Some of those people she was responsible for their deaths. But there were others. So many others. Her parents who went to sleep in the dark and woke up on the other side, a house fire leaving her an orphan. Girls who failed out of the Red Room. Natasha herself. People who were kidnapped and had disappeared beyond even SHIELD’s reach. The dark was endless and frightening and terrifying and she loved it. She loved it because it made her feel mortal and weak and sometimes, when she felt weary from the power that came from killing others, she wanted to feel useless, limp, and powerless. Mortality, she thought more than once, was a powerful drug. It reminded her of all the things she had to live for. 

Dark took away her sight. It took away his sight. It rendered them both incredibly vulnerable and as soon as they slid down the tunnel that dumped them, as soon as the dank, damp air hit her face and crept over her skin, making her hair stand up, Natasha let out a short, breathy laugh at the anxiety that splashed up over her ribs and heart. She heard Clint’s breath rattle in and out of his chest once.

“Catch me,” he said, and there were only two audible footsteps before she was alone in the inky darkness. 

She smiled into the dark. He was right. This would settle her. Keep her brain from ping-ponging between we’re in this together and I’m the goddamn Black Widow and if you try to ‘help’ me, so help you.... She was too restless. She needed her heart to pound. Needed to be hit. Needed to be kicked and to kick. Needed to be pinned to the ground. She wanted it. She needed what he was offering her. 

She knelt to the ground and pressed her palm against the cool rough cement. She straightened and slipped through the darkness. She listened for his breathing, heard the sound his fingertips brushing against pipes, and she wanted those fingertips on her, roughened and sure, gliding over her like he was swinging through this maze of pipes. She heard him curse softly, ever so softly, when he hit a pipe with some part of his body. She controlled her breathing, but couldn’t be sure he couldn’t hear her heart beating out of her chest. She ran along a pipe, a hand above her, following the path of the pipe. The cold bit at her throat and lungs. She shivered. She turned with the pipe, following her instincts. She paused at a junction, listening for his breathing. She heard nothing. Nothing at all around her. She felt a shiver of fear. She inched forward on the pipe.

She collided with his body and reacted as swiftly as he did. He swung a foot at her feet and she leapt in the air, kicking him in the gut and swinging at his head. He caught her fist and twisted her arm, flipping her over the pipe. She landed and jerked, pulling him onto the pipe. She leapt over him and slammed her elbow into his back. He grunted, shifted, and fell to the ground. She went to kick him and her foot swung into midair.

She crouched, a hand on the ground, a leg outstretched, her heart pounding and her breath coming in gasps, as she listened for him.

He came at her from above. She twisted in time, hearing the sound of his feet or hands leaving pipe, but he landed on her ankles anyways. She kicked out hard and grabbed a pipe, trying to pull herself upright. His hand closed around her hip and he yanked her back onto the ground. She hooked her knees on either side of him and grunted as she tried to flip both of them. They rolled to the side. He laughed slightly. Her fist connected with the side of his face and his hand grabbed her wrist and pinned it above her head. His other hand found her free hand and pinned it as well. His nose ran down the side of her neck. She bit his shoulder. He laughed and she drew up a knee and hit him in his gut. He grunted softly and his grip loosened. She rolled them both over and pinned his hands above his head, sitting flush down on his hips. He stilled instantly.

She leaned down, her lips fumbling for his ear. She nipped him and whispered, “You think that pinning me down will make me more compliant?”

“I’m never under the impression that anything I do will make you more compliant,” he hissed, rocking his hips into hers.

She rocked her hips back into his, rolling slowly against him until he moaned. She said, “I don’t do group missions.”

“You can’t be handling me with kid gloves anymore, Tasha,” he growled. 

She stilled and he made a noise of discontent. She kissed him, hard and fierce. He groaned into her mouth and his tongue skimmed over her teeth. She bit it. His chest vibrated against hers with contained laughter. She held his hands over his head and kissed him until she couldn’t breathe, until she couldn’t think.

“I--” she whispered, unsure. “This is my problem.”

“Yeah. It is,” he managed to say. “Also mine. And you know, Banner’s. His lab is a little bit broken.”

She considered this and said, “When I said together, I meant your head.”

He pulled his head up to kiss her and it drew her down against him. Her free hand gripped his hair. He said, “I know. But this is what I meant.”

She did not have the answers. Not yet. She wanted to deal with Shosta alone, but she wanted him covering her. There was a safety in knowing that Barton was above you in the shadows, an arrow to his bow, his eyes keen and trained and calm. It was a reassurance that Natasha had grown fond of and she would miss that if she went alone.

But then, in this moment, she wanted a togetherness of another kind. 

Darkness was all about sound and touch. It was about sensation instead of sight. And when she released his hands, Barton used his senses and her senses to full advantage. Turns out that archers weren’t so bad in the dark either.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: torture, explicit content (sex and violence, what else did you expect from these two?), flashbacks

Clint lay on his back of the cold, damp cement cell and stared at the ceiling, at the soft gray light spilled there. Around his ankle, a medieval like shackle held him to the stone floor. It was too small, made for men two centuries past, and it bit into his ankle. He could not feel his feet. A long time ago, he stopped checking on his ankle. He did not need to see his foot a distorted shade of purple and without feeling. He just kept telling himself it could be worse. It could be his hands. In his mind, he reviewed everything that led him—them—to this. He told himself that he needed to remember so he could debrief everyone when he got home. When they got home. It was hours since he last heard Natasha but he refused to believe it wouldn’t be both of them going home. He just needed to remember.

 

             _Jerusalem_

            What he remembered was the unholiness of Natasha’s hands on him. The flight over was long and they had fought, in low voices, in Russian, for almost the entirety of the flight. They fought about their covers, about how to go about the mission, about Natasha’s insistence that she do most of the leg work herself, about Clint’s inability to let her out of his eyesight ( _“Christ, Tash,” he spat at her, “it’s not like there isn’t a murderer trying to kill you or anything.”)_ and they had fought more when she checked her phone on landing, paled, and silently handed him the phone. There was a text from Shosta that said only, “Your passport photo is adorable. Red hair? I didn’t know you had it in you, darling.”. When Clint found out it wasn’t the first text that Shosta had sent her, that Natasha had suspected that someone at Stark was giving Shosta access or Shosta had hacked Stark Tower’s network, he had been furious. It was one thing for her to be a stubborn woman hellbent on doing things her way, like she used to, alone, but it was another for her to deliberately withhold information which affected their mission. That was not Natasha. That was not the Black Widow. That was just  _stupid_  and he told her so in as many languages he knew which was less than the number of languages that she used to tell him to shut up.

            They had not spoken for most of the first day. They reconned the streets where Natasha had seduced and killed a mark but was shot by one of his bodyguards on her way out. It was one of the first missions Clint had not accompanied her on. He had been in Santiago, Chile, at the time, and no one told him until after they had successfully extracted her that she had spent two days in an abandoned slum house bleeding slowly from a disastrous shoulder injury. Only Natasha’s unusual genetic makeup allowed her to survive. Coulson had nearly not survived telling Clint. Even now, when Natasha stood inside the house where she had found safety, Clint found himself shaking and he stepped out into the sunlight. He never liked being inside, and inside somewhere dark, dry, reeking of feces, and imagining her injured and on the ground was too much at that moment.

            It was his retreat that brought her around. When she finished searching the house for clues or messages from Shosta, she stepped back into the narrow alley and found him watching kids play a stick and ball game. She had taken his hand then, an abrupt and surprisingly intimate gesture for her, and given him a small, sympathetic smile. She said nothing until they returned to their hotel room where she had only whispered, “ _Please”_  before pushing him against the wall and pulling his mouth to hers, parting only to yank her shirt over her head and he was gone, lost in her.

            He remembered that. He remembered every damn detail of her. He remembered the way that in his world where his mind could calculate probability, wind speeds, angles, weights, speeds, where everything was defined by an edge, she was nothing but never ending curves. The softness of her made him hard in a heartbeat and later, they’d laugh about how that struck him as incongruous. But she was all heat even when she was the ice queen and she could melt him. She was his undoing. It was unholy, the things they did in that hotel room in the holy city. It was unholy and it was hot and he could not forget it.

            Shosta left them a note with the concierge.  _Blank. Next._  was all it said. Round one over.

           

_London_

            He committed to memory the following:

            The feeling of rain on bare skin.

            The rush of running rooftops in the dark, in the rain, when everything was slick on slate roofs, when he wasn’t quite sure if he would land properly.

            His first ride on an underground train.

            The desire to kill Shosta slowly, painfully, when there was a note stuck to their hotel room with a bloody fingerprint. The note told them that the son of Natasha’s mark died. The Avengers left in New York confirmed that the blood was in fact the blood of the child. They could not find him. He was presumed dead. Shosta was playing for keeps.

            The stillness of Natasha’s face when she sat next to the window, staring at the city, refusing to sleep.

            The prayer she spoke in Russian, the one she said would ease the boy’s spirit to the other side.

            The realization that she believed in another side.

            Round two over.

 

_Barcelona_

            Two blanks. And this time he sent nightshade to their rooms to welcome them to Barcelona. Natasha had laughed and it was the first sound she had made since the note on London’s door.

            Shosta left them more clues. A girl who had been in the Red Room with Natasha is the maid who comes to clean their room. But when Natasha threw her against the wall, a knife against her throat, and demanded to know everything, the girl had cried hysterically. It took both Clint and Natasha interoggating her to realize she had been brainwashed, her slate wiped clean, reprogrammed for a life of innocence. She knew nothing of Shosta. But she was a sign. It could not be coincidence.

            The room they were assigned was 425 which was the flight number of the crash which supposedly killed Shosta. The bus they took from their hotel to the neighborhood where Natasha had lost her mark was 16, the age Natasha was when her marriage to Shosta had been arranged. Natasha found these clues unremarkable. Clint found them frustrating. He refused to take the bus back, insisting on walking.

            The bus blew up on the ride back.

            He never did trust public transportation.

            They pulled survivors out.

            Clint felt his mind shutting down. It felt like New York. He saw people screaming and he felt like he was watching them behind thick glass, like at a zoo, like Loki was in his mind again. He could not help them. He stared at a woman who was bleeding from the neck and writhing on the ground and it was Natasha’s hands that pressed down onto the wound and Natasha’s voice that soothed the woman. Clint stood there blankly.

            When they returned to the hotel room, Natasha led him into the bathroom and rubbed the blood out from her hands and his hands. She kissed his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, and gave him a glass of water. She drugged it, but he didn’t know it then. He fell asleep for the first time in weeks for more than a few hours. He slept all day. When he woke up, he was groggy, but a little more like himself. Natasha took him to Gaudi’s gardens at night and gave him his bow.

            He shot arrows into sculptures until the buzzing in his brain cleared and his vision was sharp again. She was like a Roman goddess, still and quiet, in the corner, watching him with her lips pressed together, but her eyes were soft. She looped her arm through his and took him home. She slept next to him, her leg thrown protectively over his body, half covering his torso with hers, like she was shielding him from his nightmares.

            Three blanks.

             _Sarajevo_

            It wore on them both. They spoke less, touched more, though the sex was less. He slept less, she ate less. It was a mission. This was to be expected. Normally they were chasing people who existed, not ghosts, and there was the distinct impression that they were the hunted, not the hunters. Neither assassin was prepared for that sensation, at the way it crawled under the skin, made them jump at the slightest noise, the way it grated at their bones and wore them down. In Sarajevo in a rundown hotel on the wrong side of town overlooking the river and the semi-erect bridges, in the snow, they were exhausted after weeks of chasing the clues that Shosta left around the world.

            What Clint never wanted to remember about Sarajevo was finding scraps of Natasha’s past—mementos to the horrendous hits that the Red Room sent her on years ago—scattered around the city. Photos and music and memories meant to haunt her.

            What he never wanted to forget was standing with his eyes closed under the hote shower when she opened the door and silently climbed with her clothes on into the shower with him. He never wanted to forget the way that for the first time in a very long time, she wrapped herself around him and drew in shaky breaths. He wanted to give her all the strength he had, even when he felt weak, but in that moment, standing under the water, his eyes closed and his mouth against the soft skin under her ear, her mouth against his collarbone, it was enough.

            Shosta shot at them, an arrow buried in the wall above their heads. Attached to the arrow as a note.

             _Roulette’s fun. It was always my favorite, wasn’t it, Natashka? Four._

            She had risen then, naked, and walked to the window. Clint sat up in bed and watched her, breathless from fear. She raised her right hand and flipped Shosta, wherever he was, the bird.

            Clint laughed for the first time in weeks.

             _Kyiv_

            “This is it,” Natasha had told him quietly when they took the taxi to a small apartment complex outside the city centre where she maintained a safe house. She nodded. “This is where he’ll stand his ground. This is it.”

            He asked why and Natasha had shrugged. “If it isn’t, then we’re too prepared for the last round, because it must be it. He wouldn’t want us to be too prepared. Besides, this is practically his backyard. He will be more comfortable here.”

            There had been a pause then Natasha looked back at him, her green eyes flinty, and said in a lower voice, “And I feel it.”

            He trusted her intuition. He contacted Stark, Banner, Steve, the others, and prepared them for the recon that would take them into the heart of Ukrainian druglords tied to politicians and human trafficking. They needed to find the family members of Natasha’s Kyivan mark. The clues would be with them.

            They did not get the chance.

            The taxi never took them to the address Natasha gave them.

            It took a left at a traffic circle and Natasha’s eyes had narrowed slightly. Before she could signal to Clint anything, there had been a burst of light and they had fallen unconscious.

           

            He wished he remembered more.

 

            He reviewed these facts over and over in his mind. And when he could hear her muffled screams from across the hall, when he fought against the metal biting into his leg and holding him to the stone, when he was exhausted from fighting the need to scream her name, he tried to hold onto these facts and nothing more.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **TRIGGER WARNING: Depictions of torture and possible reading of sexual assault**

 

           

The alley was cool, damp, dimly lit by the faint lights of the major streets at either end. Natasha skirted around dumpsters, stepping over trash, her eyes skimming for trip wires, mines, people both alive and dead. Her heart pounded in her throat and her fingers around the trigger of her gun trembled. She was uncomfortable and she had never once been uncomfortable with a gun in her hand. She was never uncomfortable moving through any space with a mission in her mind. She was a weapon, she carried weapons, she could make and find weapons. She was never alone and she was never unarmed as long as she could breathe. She ran along the pathways of her mind, seeking the cause of her nerves, and found it nestled in the heart of her mind: she had no mission. There was no reason for her to be in the alley, no reason for a gun to be in her hand, no reason for her to be looking for tripwires. _Tripwires._ She looked for one. She knew there was one. And there it was, between a dumpster, underneath a stray cat’s dead body and a plastic bag. She walked over, raised her foot, and pressed downwards.

The explosion was _deafening._

She gasped, her eyes opening as she surfaced from the water. The oxygen she pulled into her lungs was slammed back out of her when she was thrown against the wall. Pain felt like the way prey ran from predators: wildly skipping all over her body, hopeless and wild, and bright. She was bound at the ankles and wrists behind her back in rope wrapped in barbed wire. She remembered this. She knew if she reached for this, she knew where she was and who had bound her. There had been a bright light with no pain and when she had woken, she had been undressed and bound on the floor. It was cold. It smelled like cigarette smoke and blood. _Kyiv._ She remembered now. _Shosta. Alexei Shostakov_. He had been the one to wrap her in razor wire.

“Natashka,” a voice silky smooth, a cobra in her memories, something dangerous and dark. His fingers caressed her shoulder. “You look beautiful like this. You always did.”

She swallowed blood and a tooth. Her hair was wet all over her face and she could not see him. One eye was swollen shut. She was not sure that her back was not broken.

Shosta said to her, “You know what I’ve always loved about you, Natashka? You are nearly impossible to kill. I love testing the limits of that.”

Natasha knew a hundred ways to be dead while her heart still beat and her lungs still inhaled and exhaled and her brain still showed activity. She had lived those hundred ways and she knew there would be others. She knew only a few ways to live. _Clint_.  She seized onto his name, unfolded it in her mind, clung to it like a drowning sailor clung to a rope. She could smell him on her skin, the lotion he used for his wind burnt arms and face, the resin for his bow mixed with the scent of her own sex on the tips of his fingertips. The cigarette and blood smell faded from the air and she drew Clint into her. _Kyiv_ had been a mistake but there had been cities and lifetimes before that. They spilled like ink over her vision and her mind. She had fallen in love with him all over again. There were lifetimes and stories between her and Clint and they could be arranged like stars in the sky into constellations, mutating as the earth turned and the seasons changed, colder, warmer, falling, growing. But somewhere in the rain in London, she had looked at him and she had seen him like she had never seen him before this hunt. She had always known that he was quiet and determined, and she had known his stubbornness as she had known her own.

But for all those years, she had taken his beauty granted, and not just in the ways he was physically attractive. It was like he had stored up kindness, bravery, and patience in the unappreciated parts of his body: the backs of his hands, the crooks of his elbows, the space between his eyes, the back of his neck, the curve of his spine, the bend of his knees. In their arguments on the plane to Jerusalem, she forgot the way she loved how her mother tongue stumbled out of his tongue. On the streets of London, she had found that being kissed in the rain was the best way to be kissed. In the sadness of Sarajevo, she remembered that his laughter was her synonym for freedom. 

She held these memories until a foot connected with her temple, and everything went black.

She woke again, by force, a needle in her arm. She jerked, one eye opening. Shosta moved away from her, capping the needle and tossing it on the floor. She could see a pile of needles accumulating in the corner. She counted them as quickly as she could, folded the memory into her mind with _escape_ , and closed her mind off to him. She did not know how much he had at his disposal.

Alexei Shostakov was handsome, even after dying. He had blonde hair, bright blue eyes, stood a head and a half taller than her and was almost as broad as Captain America. He was dressed in army fatigue pants and a black tank top. Blood streaked over his arms and hands. There was no one else in the room but she doubted they were alone.

He smiled at her, toothless and small. “Good morning. I hear these days you go by Natasha Romanov. Natalia Romanova is dead?”

“As dead as you are,” she replied, her tongue thick in her mouth.

“I saw you on the news,” Shosta said, squatting in front of her. “You were as beautiful and deadly as I remember you. You don’t look a day older.”

She squinted at him. “You look a little older but that could be from being dead for awhile.”

He backhanded her and said, “Bitch.”

She smiled. “You don’t know me, Alexei.”

He laughed and said, “I think I do, Natasha Romanov of SHIELD.” He ran a hand down her body, over her breasts, down the curve of her side, over her thigh, between her legs. “You are useless to me. You have been made and remade so many times that you are a quilt, Natashka. You are your own identity and I cannot make you mine again. You are useless.”

She held onto her mind as long as she could. But his next words almost spun her out. “But the archer…oh Natasha, your archer is a gift. The god who came through the tesseract had the right idea. Your archer has heart.”

“I am more skilled than he is,” Natasha managed to say, breathless.

Shosta wiped her blood across her stomach. “True. He never misses a long distance shot but his chances of seducing anyone are rather limited. How did he manage with you?”

Natasha held his gaze and smiled. “The same way he seduced you, Alexei. Heart.”

Shosta laughed. “Does he know, Natashka? That you led him straight to me?”

She told herself to bring her mind back into focus and it took a moment, but the glint of a chain beneath Shosta’s black top helped when it caught the light. She focused on it, remembered the idea of light, remembered Clint, Clint’s laughter, the way that he draped diamonds around her neck and kissed the skin beneath the latch before she went off to find a mark, remembered the way he helped her find herself, even after they stopped sleeping together.

“I knew that if I went after him directly, you would come find me and kill me,” Shosta explained, tugging a knife out of his back pocket and turning it over. Natasha’s eyes followed it. “Loki did this wrong, you see, because you will always come after him. You are weak because you are compromised. He compromised you.”

She almost laughed at the use of the word, but breathing hurt, and laughing would be worse. It was insanity, the way it bubbled up in her mind. Razor blades around her wrists and she wanted to laugh over Shosta’s unintentional sex joke. She folded that into her mind to tell Clint later, and attached it to the word _hope_ , pressing it deep into her mind. _You will not take that, Shosta,_ she said silently, her eyes following the knife.

“But a threat to you…oh he’d follow you anywhere. No one would think that he was my target. And you did. You walked him right into my trap, Natashka.”

“Then just kill me and take his mind, Alexei. Stop playing with your food,” she said, her exhaustion only barely feigned. “I have no patience for your games.”

“Oh, no, darling girl,” Shosta smiled. “He’s going to give it to me. Willingly. When he sees you. Minds are so much more malleable when they’re freely given.”

The blade slid over her skin and her eyes rolled back into her head. She was gone.  

Bodies store pain. Memory holds pain. Every cell in her body lit up like the Fourth of July, like a city in a firefight in the night. She could feel everything and she could feel nothing. Her body arched and fought back, but everything inside her bones collapsed. She absorbed the pain like the air absorbed her screams. When she fought, instinctively, against the knife, the razors on the wire around the rope around her body sliced into her skin. She tasted blood. She smelled blood. She wondered if Clint was still alive or if Shosta was merely playing with her. She wondered if anything was real.  


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: Depictions of torture and possible sexual assault

 

            Clint had no way to keep track of time. Food was delivered sporadically, water even less often. He began to hoard both food and water. Somewhere in his mind, he knew that this was the logical order of things. He would begin to control whatever he could control in his environment and this was the only thing he could control. He had read the Army’s extensive study on the effective of starvation on a few volunteer servicemembers who participated in the experiment and he had been held as a prisoner before, but not like this. He never saw who came and went. He saw no other people and heard nothing except her screams. He repeated in his mind everything that happened between getting on a flight in New York and waking up in the cell over and over again until he was sure he was forgetting details, or inventing them, and maybe he wasn’t actually here at all. It took everything in his power not to scream her name back at her when he heard her, wherever she was, her voice reverberating off the damp walls and he lost track of the sound and its direction. His voice could only make it clearer that they were each other’s weakest spot.

            So he lay on the cold stone and could only hope that the team, who had been tracking them this entire time, offering support the whole way, would find their location and get them both out before it was too late. Clint was not used to relying on people who appeared as unreliable and disorganized as Steve, Tony, and Bruce. SHIELD was a well oiled machine, even if they were corrupt and even if they did lie occasionally, and the teams that were sent in to get people out of sticky situations like this were extremely professional and well equipped. They did not require direction as to _what_ to smash, like Hulk did, and they did not suffer from overblown egos, like Tony did, and they were not sentimental, as Steve could be.

            Sometime after the last round of screams had died down and he had stopped shaking from biting his arm against his own screams, stopped sending his own mind away to some vacant soundless place, the door to his cell opened.

            Clint sat up, scrambling to his feet as much as he could, prepared to fight as much as he could. If he was going to die here, underground and cold and hungry, then at least some of Shosta’s men were going to die with him. Clint never meant to play the martyr. He was no hero in any of the stories anyone would ever tell. That was for Steve and Tony. Clint was the man in the shadows and he always knew he would die in the shadows. Weeks ago now, he should have died at the hands of the only person he ever loved. She had spared him. He owed her a debt.

            But the guard shook his head and said, his tongue thick with a Ukrainian accent, “You do not want to do that. Shosta has the Black Widow. He wants to see both of you.”

            Clint’s head was too fuzzy for him to censor his rooms. “She is alive?”

            The guard shrugged. “If you want.”

            The chances of it being a trick were solid. The chances of him dying were high. The chances of them killing him in front of Natasha were almost as high, equal as long as she was still alive, which Clint couldn’t be sure about. The hallways were silent. He took in as much as he could from his surroundings. He counted his steps to each turn (37, 4, 19, 13, 54, 23 stairs) and looked for windows but everything was dark and dimly lit by fluorescent lights that ran for several feet at a time, connected by loops of extension cords. At the bottom of the stairs was a thick door. A blast door. The guard knocked three times, listened, and then someone on the inside opened the door.

            The room was bright, well lit with sunlight that spilled through three large windows overlooking a rocky ravine. The glass was just distorted enough that Clint could tell it was bullet proof, or at least resistant. The room was the size of three cells, void of furniture except a large wooden desk and a red chair behind it. Books and papers and photos—him, Natasha, Tony, the entire team together—were haphazardly stacked all over the desk and floor.

            A man that Clint could only assume was Alexei Shostakov stood quietly at the desk, tall and lanky, like a lean, bright blue eyed version of Captain America if Captain America radiated sadism and cruelty. The smile that twitched over the corner of Shosta’s mouth was sadistic. He said in nearly perfect English, “Hello, Agent Barton.”

            “Shostakov,” Clint said, accenting the name properly.

            “I believe I have something of yours,” Shosta began and then paused, smiled, “Well, actually, I just took it back.

            Clint met Shosta’s eyes and said, “That’s not how it works.”

            Shosta smiled and turned his head, snapping his fingers to two of the guards. Clint’s eyes scanned the room, the frames of the windows, the ceiling, the doors for any way to escape. His eyes found a camera sitting in the corner, blatantly blinking its obnoxious red light at him, and he tore his eyes away from it to the girl that they were shuffling through the door and into the room where Shosta was speaking to her in fluent Russian.

            If it wasn’t for her uplifted chin and her one, visible, strikingly green eye, he may not have recognized Natasha as she was. She was battered and bruised, walking as if one of her legs might have been broken, barely able to stay upright. Her breathing was tight and shallow in the upper part of her chest, fluttering above her breasts. Her hands were bound in front of her in rope wrapped in barbed wire and he suspected her feet were usually bound too. Her hair was tangled and knotted, crusted with blood. She stared at him and he almost thought he saw a flicker of relief over her face. She had not known if he was alive either.

            He said lightly, as lightly as he could manage, as rage ran like a wildfire through his body, deliberately forcing himself to relax. “You look like you could be auditioning for a zombie movie.”

            The corner of her mouth tightened slightly. A Natasha smile. She said nothing. Maybe she could not.

            “So here you are, man who fucks Black Widow—,” began Shosta, gesturing to Natasha.

            “I don’t fuck the Black Widow,” interrupted Clint, a little of his anger tightening his voice up a bit and he swallowed it back forcefully, pulling at all of his training to control himself. He shrugged, painfully, not looking at her. “Sometimes I sleep with Natasha Romanov and sometimes, if I am very lucky, I get to have sex with her. Not the Black Widow.”

            “Natasha Romanov is not real,” snapped Shosta, his voice tight. “You have created her for your own will and desires. She is false person. She is—how do you say—patchwork. Invented. Invisible. She is not real, like cover identity.” His mouth spat the words out. “You took away woman I loved long time ago and you made her woman. You use her just like Red Room did. You think you know everything, Agent Barton, but you know nothing.”

            Clint’s eyes lifted, slightly, his sniper sight catching on the red light of the camera that was blinking above Shosta’s head. It began to blink erratically, but not quite out of pattern. He met Shosta’s eyes. “She makes her own decisions about where she goes and what she does. She never has to kill unless she doesn’t want to. More than your people did for her.”

            “We are not here to talk about Natashka,” Shosta scowled and dismissed him. He strode, hands in his pockets, around the other side of the desk. He took out a bottle of amber liquid, unmarked, and poured some into a small glass. He said, “I know you like to drink, Agent Barton.”

            “How long?” asked Clint after a moment. He did not look at Natasha at all.

            “Are you asking how long I have known you are true prize?” asked Shosta in reply. He looked up, raising his eyebrows, and gestured at a second glance. Clint shook his head and Shosta shrugged, capping the bottle and sliding it back under the desk. He stared into the glass. “You see, I told my Natasha. She is too—ah, broken? She has been made and remade too many times to be useful to me anymore. I may keep her, like pet, you see? But you, Agent Barton, you looked so malleable, like clay. I knew this before that god made you his. Now I know definitely you are what I want. I have little arsenal and it needs you.”

            Clint knew exactly what he did not want: he did not want to be anyone’s toy anymore to be wound up and pointed at targets. Not again. He did not want Natasha to die, and he didn’t particularly want to die, but he would rather that they be dead than be this man’s toy. Natasha had said that Shosta was Red Room but he certainly did not act like he worked on their behalf at the moment. He glanced again, the brightness of the light on the camera standing out in the dull gray.

            The blinking changed again and Clint almost frowned, almost, but he glanced sideways, and saw that Natasha had followed his glance with her one eye up to the camera as well, and he saw her look back at him and deliberately blink once, twice, twice, once. It made no sense…until everything made sense.

            Clint needed to keep Shosta rambling. “Tell me how you hacked the Stark Tower.”

            “Ah,” Shosta seemed delighted to show off his technological prowess. He began to ramble about someone who worked in Stark Industries being former KGB and having given him the access codes that they routed through Natasha’s laptop, knowing that Jarvis would detect a virus or any attempt at hacking. They used pre-existing security protocols, and he rambled on, using tech talk Clint didn’t understand and didn’t care about.

            Clint kept his peripheral vision on the camera and watched it. Natasha was right. There was a pattern to the blinks. Morse. He found it in his head, watching and translating.

            WE ARE COMING. WE ARE COMING. WE ARE COMING. WE ARE COMING.

            Repetitive. Reassuring. Simple. It was for them. It had to be for them, who else would send the message? It had to be the rest of the team. They had been found. They would see on the monitor that Natasha was too badly injured to be considered a part of any escape plan. They would see that he was significantly more able bodied than she was. And they were coming. Clint didn’t think he had ever felt as relieved as he felt in that moment, not even when he foggily asked Natasha on the walkway in the carrier, “ _Tasha?_ ”

            “Are you paying attention, Agent Barton?” asked Shosta.

            Clint’s eyes snapped back over to him and found him flickering a lighter next to Natasha’s arm. Natasha looked unimpressed. She said in Russian, “You did not pay attention. Start with a lighter then escalate to lacerations. You want the skin to be prone to infection before you slice it, rather than sealing a wound with a lighter.”

            “It’s cute,” said Clint a little dryly, “I can just see your marriage. Comparison of interrogation techniques.”

            Shosta smiled and yanked Natasha’s head back by her hair, lifting the lighter to her face. Clint stepped forward but Natasha shifted only a fraction before she slammed her forehead forward into Shosta’s head and drew up her injured leg, hard, between Shosta’s legs. He jerked, simultaneously waving off the guards that leapt to him, and he threw her, like a rag doll across his desk, and she slid, her body carrying books and papers with her across the floor and she landed out of sight. Clint willed himself to stand his ground. He flicked his eyes up to the camera. The message was the same. He could hear Natasha’s haggard breathing on the other side of the desk. Shosta was looking to him for a reaction so Clint gave him the best bland expression he could muster.

            Shosta scowled. “Here is deal. She lives. I release her back to your _Avengers_. You stay here. You are mine.”

            The worst of deals. He had not considered that, that he was so enticing (he could not believe it—who wanted him when they could have Natasha?) that Shosta would let her go in exchange for Clint’s freedom. Clint would rather die than be Shosta’s pet, but then, he suspected, Shosta was going to play Loki’s game anyway. He was going to torture Natasha ( _slowly, intimately, in every way she feared_ ) in front of Clint, or get him to do it, until Clint let her go in exchange for his own life. He understood what Shosta understood: Clint loved her. Shosta had seen it somehow.

            Shosta dragged Natasha upright and shook her violently. She was too rattled, her eye closed, her body limp, to fight back now. He looked at Clint and said, “What is your reply, Barton?”

            “You set this up. You took out her mark in Buenos Aires so she would be in New York when Banner’s lab blew. You knew that if the team was involved, she would have to take me and not come here alone. You set up those other cities, all to get me? Why not just kidnap me? It would not have been hard,” Clint asked him tiredly.

            “Choose, Barton,” snapped Shosta.

            Clint met his eyes. “You owe me this.”

            Shosta considered and shrugged. “Because minds are more open to accepting programming when reality just before programming is so terrible they cannot accept to stay.” He shook Natasha again. “Why do you think she was able to be programmed so many times?”

            Clint looked at the camera again. This time Shosta’s eyes followed his glance and he smiled and shrugged. “How is it you say? You are on candid camera.”

            Clint smiled back, relieved that Shosta hadn’t noticed the red light whose message had abruptly changed. “You can kill her. I want to walk out of here.”

 


End file.
